Bathroom Monologue: On Writer’s Block

It besets a perfectly well-meaning, perfectly well-read, perfectly talented and motivated writer, who had no intention of dicking around on Twitter and Reddit for hours. As soon as this bold thinker’s hands approach the keyboard, it strikes. For one out of every three cases, the writer’s fingers are broken by the strike, but regardless the writer’s block remains hovering in the air, obstructing the keyboard. Its onset is harrowing. No wedging or cajoling of the keyboard will loose it from beneath a writer’s block; the block will simply move to continue interference regardless of position. It haunted typewriters, and before it, blocked inkwells and Greek slates. Anthropologists posit that it is what necessitated oral storytelling among otherwise literate tribes. It is a persistent issue of the human condition. Those Great American Novelists among us will take drills, hammers and chisels to the block, to liberate their means of expression. Let it be known that writer’s block can be broken, but beware its insidious side-effect: for the writer is left so agitated by the inexplicable black blockage, and so exhausted from the labor of destroying it, that he or she is typically left without the energy to write afterward. In at least a third of cases, the keyboard is also destroyed.